Search the internet and you will find thousand advices that are suppose to make you happy, from buying a cat to donating an organ. Obviously, happiness is something that is damn important to all of us. But, like the “Holy Grail”, the search for eternal happiness has eluded us. Web defines happiness as “state of well-being characterised by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy”. I know this definition is open to a debate, let’s just pretend it is true. But the real questions are - why is happiness so important to us and what make us happy!
In no other era in the history of mankind did we have so many reasons to be happy than the one we are living in. Recent statistics, including the one by Steven Pinker, shows that violence is at an all time low. There is dramatic reduction in war deaths, domestic violence, racism, rape and murder globally (Figure 1). For the first time ever more people kills themselves then getting killed by others. World energy consumption, an indicator of our lifestyle, is also increasing exponentially (Figure 2). Energy consumption increased six times since 1960, while the population grew just 2.2 times. The middle class now has more luxury than a Medieval king. With all the reasons we have to be happy, are we any happier?
Figure 1: Decrease in deaths due to conflicts.
Figure 2: World Energy Consumption by Source, Based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects together with BP Statistical Data for 1965 and subsequent years. [http://www.doomsteaddiner.net]
Figure 3: GDP vs per capita power consumption. [http://www.ourenergypolicy.org]
While there is a direct correlation between GDP and per capita energy consumption (Figure 3), the relation between Human Development Index (HDI) and per capita energy consumption is a bit tricky (Figure 4). HDI is calculated from various factors including life expectancy at birth, years of schooling, and per capita gross national income. Overall the HDI gets better with per capita energy consumption. However, there is a lot of scatter at the lower energy consumption area, and above a particular amount of energy consumption it does not improve the HDI. While poverty does indeed make us unhappy, wealth does not necessarily make us happy.
Figure 4: HDI vs per capita power consumption. [http://www.ourenergypolicy.org]
Surveys done over time in developed countries have shown that, despite increase in income, people are not getting happier. Once the basic needs are fulfilled, money doesn’t really make you happy. People are in fact getting lonelier and depressed. As a result, suicide rates are increasing at an alarming pace (Figure 5). Self harm is the leading cause of death in today’s world (Figure 6). India has one of the highest suicide rates in the world (Figure 7) and it is going to get worse unless something is done. Despite the luxuries, why is happiness eluding us?
Figure 5: Increase in global suicide rate (https://www.vitamindwiki.com/)
Figure 6: How we die.
Figure 7: Suicide problem of India.
In her paper ‘Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away- The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness’ published in 2010, Quoidbach et al. demonstrates that ‘having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures’. She came to that conclusion after two different experiments. In the first experiment she found out that wealthy people savoured chocolate less than the less wealthy ones. In the second experiment one set of people were primed by showing them pictures of money, while the other was not. Despite similar economic background, those who saw pictures of money before tasting chocolates savoured the chocolates less than those who were not shown pictures of money. Despite some odd possibility of alternate explanations, like people lost apatite for chocolates after seeing money and thinking of germs, I believe her results were right. It was not just her experiments, but the results of a survey done in US (Figure 8) and some other countries have shown that increase in income is not making people happy. The results are not surprising if one understands what happiness is.
Figure 8: Consumption and happiness in US.
A bacteria in the soil in your backyard can actually make you happy (read get you high). The culprit here is a bacterium named Mycobacterium vaccae. This was discovered quite accidentally in 2004 by an oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital named Mary O’Brien. She was injecting lung cancer patient with serum from Mycobacterium vaccae because the bacterium was thought to have immune boosting response on patients. While it failed to heal the cancer, instead it made the patients happier and improved their lifestyle. It has been found that bacteria and bacterial products can have effect on brain and the neural pathways in a way that it affects human behaviour. That is how our emotions work. It is controlled not by the external situation you are in, but by your internal biochemistry.
Chemicals inside you effect your emotions, external factors can only activate those chemicals. Nicole Lazzaro explains that there are four different chemicals released by the brain (neurotransmitters) that can make you happy - dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. Dopamine is released on anticipation of happy event or stress. It controls human emotions, including desires, achievements, pleasures, mood, sleep and happiness. Oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone”, is released by the pituitary gland, especially when one come in close proximity to another person. It sometimes has the affect of falling in love and is also called as the “cuddle hormone”. It helps in relationships and bonding and the resulting feeling of happiness caused by oxytocin secretion is different from the happiness due to pleasure or achievement created by dopamine. Serotonin’s affect on happiness is debatable, however it has been proven that this hormone helps us in learning. Some people claim that it affects mood, and lack of it can make one feel low. Endorphins are known to mask pain and discomfort. They can be released during vigorous exercise and lead to an effect termed as “runners high”. There must be several other chemicals that affect our mood than the four described by Lazzaro. The secretion of these chemicals may or may not be caused by external situations. It can be artificially triggered by drugs or meditation. And, more importantly, it does not depend on the amount of energy you consume, or how luxurious life you live. Instead, it depends on your expectations - the deviation of what you get from what you expect. Unfortunately, when a person gets richer, his or her desires and expectations also rise. Thus, soon the difference between expectations and happiness reaches the base level. Psychologists call it “hedonic treadmill” affect.
Happiness is not external, but internal. It is a result of trials and errors of millions of years of evolution, just like the ones that made giraffe’s neck long. Professors Meike Bartels and Philipp Koellinge have found in 2016 the genes that might be responsible for happiness after studying DNA samples from 298,000 people from around the globe. They found that prevalence of FAAH gene, which makes a protein that affects feelings of pleasure and pain, correlates fairly well with “happiness” of different countries (Figure 9). Some research even claims that happiness is 50% genetic. If evolution indeed favoured happiness, the question is why?
Figure 9: Correlation between FAAH gene and happiness (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3559114/Is-happiness-DNA-Study-finds-genes-affect-mood-prone-depression-neuroticism.html#ixzz4tEq7nVhd )
According to evolutionary psychologists like Robert Cummins of Deakin University of Melbourne happiness, just like the negative emotions of fear, anger and disgust, evolved because it gave us adaptive advantage. Negative emotions are stronger because it keeps us alive. Fear helps run away from predator, anger helps us beat our opponents and disgust helps us avoid poisonous food. Experiments done by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that ‘pain is more urgent than pleasure’. Once we are safe, however, happiness increases our want to survive. Fredrickson’s “broaden and build” theory propose that happiness helps us build resource and store for the future. If we were not happy eaters we would have starved to death, if we were not happy ‘maters’ we would have died long before killing the beautiful dodo birds. We are not going to survive for long if we become equally happy to see our enemies as we are when we see our friends. Positive feelings like happiness change the way our brain works and helps us gather more information. Happy people are also healthier. In short, happiness helps us survive.
While small wonders like a child’s smile, pleasant weather, a birds song, the snow capped peak, the green forest, the blue sky, food, beer and sex, can make us happy, we somehow end up confusing ourselves asking the question, ‘what makes us happy?’. Even the religions that guarantee happiness have no unique solution. The ancient philosophies of Asia declared renouncing materialism makes one happy. The idea being to reduce expectations, and thus increase the gap between what you want and what you get. Thus one would be happier. Try poverty when you have hungry mouths to feed. The medieval philosophy of West and ‘Middle-West’ (I prefer it to the term Middle-East) goes one step further and proclaims that our life is a result of sin. Death is the only way to happiness. That idea is definitely not for me. After the Renaissance people started to reject the idea of being controlled by an invisible force and started to believe in free-will. Individualistic happiness gained importance. As economies of countries grew stronger, materialistic happiness ruled the mind. The new model for strong economy was to spend more. So you had loans and credit cards along with the luring malls to make you happy. It does make you happy, but only for a very short time. All it does, is raise your expectations. We now know what rising expectations does to happiness.
In this growing materialistic world, how do we become happy? Maslow would say self actualisation, a priest would say salvation, Buddha would say renunciation. Most of them would be about reducing expectations. There are other things that has been proven to make a lot of people happy. It is listed in Figure 10.
Figure 10: What makes us happy.
Science has finally found the pill that fills your life with happiness. The secret pill they called ‘Love’. As if we are supposed to be surprised. People who are in a stable+happy+long relationship are the people who are happy. Love can even erase unhappy childhood memories. And sometimes, experiments showed, replace unhappy memories them with happy ones. Altered reality makes you unknowingly lie about your past. But then lying isn’t a bad thing when it makes you happy without harming anyone. People in love also live longer and healthier. The best way to be happy ,then, would be to love as many people as you can, but do not expect much in return.
